About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Saturday, March 5, 2016

The media keep saying that the West isn't involved in Syria. This is not true

“The
sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is
largely voluntary”, George Orwell noted
in his censored preface to his 1945 book Animal Farm. “Unpopular
ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the
need for any official ban”. Orwell went onto explain that “at any
given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is
assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is
‘not done’ to say it”.
The
corporate media’s ‘coverage’ of Syria adds a twist to Orwell’s
dictum – inconvenient reports and facts do occasionally appear in
respected newspapers and on popular news programmes but they are
invariably ignored, decontextualised or not followed up on. Rather
than informing the historical record, public opinion and government
policy these snippets of essential information are effectively thrown
down the memory hole.
Instead
the public is fed a steady diet of simplistic, Western-friendly
propaganda, a key strand of which is that the US has, as Channel 4
News’s Paul Mason blindly asserted
in January 2016, “stood
aloof from the Syrian conflict”.
This deeply ingrained ignorance was taken to comical lengths when
Mason’s Channel 4 News colleague Cathy Newman interviewed
the former senior US State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter,
with both women agreeing the US had not armed the insurgency in
Syria.
In
the real world the US has been helping
to arm the insurgency since 2012, with US officials telling
the Washington Post in last year that the CIA’s $1bn programme had
trained and equipped 10,000 rebel fighters. “From the moment the
CIA operation was started, Saudi money supported it”, notes
the New York Times. According
to the former American Ambassador to Syria, the US "has looked
the other way" while fighters it has backed have "coordinated
in military operations" with the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s
official affiliate in Syria. The UK, of course, has obediently
followed its master into the gates of hell, with the former UK
Ambassador to Syria recently explaining
the UK has made things worse by fuelling the conflict in Syria.
And
if they are not playing down the West’s interference in Syria,
journalists and their political masters are presenting Western
actions as having benign, peaceful motives. For example, in his
official response to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee report on
UK military action in Syria, British Prime Minister David Cameron
argued
“since the start of the crisis the UK has worked for a political
solution in Syria”. The Guardian’s foreign affairs specialist
Simon Tisdall echoed this idea of the West’s “basic benevolence”
in 2013 when he noted
in passing that President Obama “cannot count on Russian support to
fix Syria”.
Compare,
this propagandistic framing with what Andrew Mitchell, the former
British Secretary of State for International Development, had to say
about the West’s role in the 2012 United Nations peace plans on the
BBC Today Programme earlier this month:
“Kofi
Annan, the very distinguished former General Secretary of the United
Nations, came forward with his plan, asked by the UN
General-Secretary to do so. Part of that plan was to say that [Syrian
President Bashar] Assad is part of the problem here and, therefore,
by definition, is part of the solution, and therefore he must be
included in negotiations. And that was vetoed by the Americans and,
alas, by the British Government too.”
Mitchell’s
astonishing revelation is backed up by two highly respected Middle
East experts. In September 2015 Avi Shlaim, Professor Emeritus of
International Relations at Oxford University, noted
that Western insistence that Assad must step down sabotaged Annan’s
efforts to set up a peace deal and forced his resignation. Professor
Hugh Roberts, the former Director of the North Africa Project at the
International Crisis Group, concurs, writing
“the Western powers… sabotaged the efforts of the UN special
envoys, Kofi Annan and then Lakhdar Brahimi, to broker a political
compromise that would have ended the fighting”. Indeed, the US
Secretary of State himself conceded this reality when he recently
noted that
demanding Assad's departure up front in the peace process was "in
fact, prolonging the war."
A
quick survey of recent history shows this warmongering isn’t an
unfortunate one-off but a longstanding US policy of blocking peace
initiatives in times of conflict.(Click here for the rest of the article)